Bluetooth stickers that stop you losing life’s essentials

If you’re the sort of person who’s always losing things, then a new invention could hold the answer.

An American tech firm has come up with the idea of Bluetooth stickers that you can stick to life’s essentials like your car keys, purse or tv remote. Then, if you lose them, they’re easy to find again by using a smartphone app.

If your phone is the item you usually lose though, you could be in trouble.

But, otherwise, the Stick-N-Find stickers, which are around the size of a quarter, could come in useful.

The brainchild of John Mitts, an engineer at product development company SSI America, the app has three main features.

There’s a radar screen that displays all the devices you have stickers on. But there’s no means of telling you which direction your gizmo is in, so you just have to start walking and see if you’re getting closer or farther away – a bit like a digital version of the game you play as children when you say whether you’re getting colder or warmer.

You can also create a virtual leash with a sticker, so if that sticker moves away more than the selected distance from your phone, an alarm will go off. So, you could put a sticker on something worn by a child to make sure they don’t get too far away from you in the playground or if you’re worried about losing them in a store.

The process can also be reversed so, if you’ve put a sticker on your keys and you leave your phone behind, the sticker on the keys will buzz.

The third function is Find It when, if you’re looking to something that is missing and your phone has not found it because it is out of range, when it comes closer, your phone will alert you.

Explaining the idea behind the concept, Mitts said: “Just like everyone, we lose stuff all the time so we thought why not design an ultra-small Bluetooth connected sticker you can stick on any device, person or animal so you can easily find them?”

“The Stick-N-Find can be paged, producing both sound and light, helping you find things easily, even in the dark. You can stick it anywhere, like your TV remote for instance, so you can always find it when it gets lost. You can stick it on your keys, your dog or cat’s collar, and you can even stick it to your kids’ shoes or backpacks so you can easily monitor where they are in a store or on a playground.”

The stickers aren’t quite on the market yet, but you can already pre order them – from $35 for a pack of two up to $1,400 for what makers are billing as a company pack, if you become one of the product backers on crowdsourcing funding programme indiegogo.

Already, nearly $90,000 has been raised, $20,000 more than the original goal.

Around 50 samples are due to be produced this month, with packaging designs finalised and a 30-day product testing process begun. Mass production is scheduled to begin in February, with backers, who have already pre-ordered, receiving their stickers in March.